Primordial Questions

This book, published posthumously by Oswald Spengler's literary estate in 1965, now exists in the first English translation ever, by the American thinker and writer John David Ebert. Here is the dust jacket description from the original German edition: The course of development from the primordial source of all things, through its realization in the driving and willing forms of life, to the awakening of consciousness and the venture of human existence, is what fascinates Oswald Spengler in this late work. Equally fascinating—to the reader—is the “sensual imagination” with which Spengler seeks to capture all this pictorially and symbolically. Spengler may have transported himself back to the philosophy of the origins of all things like an Ionian thinker and made ancient Greek “wonder” the starting point of his worldview—returning from a logical interpretation of the world to an analogical (or metalogical) one and viewing the world not as an equation but as a parable. But it is precisely this unusual position that proves to be a new stimulus for thought. Even as a young man, Spengler had already studied Heraclitus in depth, who comes to mind when reading the Primordial Questions, and made him the subject of his dissertation. The impact of this encounter is evident on every page of the work.